Michele Rizzo Higher

1 JUN 2018

Dancing in a club is an act of freedom, but also of meditation; a gesture of affirmation as well as of resistance.

“A meeting between psychedelia and mysticism. A very cultivated and enigmatic creation. “Teatro e Critica

Higher is a performance inspired by the experience of clubbing. It stems from the collaboration between the Italian-Dutch eclectic performer Michele Rizzo and Lorenzo Senni, a leading name of the international electronic scene and the first Italian musician to join the prestigious British label Warp Records.
Dancing in a club is an act of freedom, but also of meditation; a gesture of affirmation as well as of resistance. This kind of dancing, even though it does not fit within precise formal categories, has a specific social role and is considered a form of prayer and of catharsis, both individual and collective. Michele Rizzo transposes the magic of club dancing to the theatre, celebrating dancing as a practice in which different identities can fuse in a single subject. Higher is the final outcome of a series of club dancing workshops led by Michele Rizzo who, over more than two years, have engaged professionals, such as the Junior Company of the Dutch National Ballet and the students of the Amsterdam Academy, and amateurs.

Michele Rizzo graduated in Choreography in 2011 from School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam where he is now regularly invited to teach choreography and movement-research. In 2015 he graduated from the visual arts Master Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Since 2012 he has been supported by Emio Greco’s CKamsterdam center of choreography and since 2015 by the Dutch fund AFK Amsterdam Fonds vor de Kunst. Since 2013 the Frascati theatre of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Something Raw festival, has produced his works: il progetto M which has taken various formats – performance, exhibition, show – Higher and his later work Spacewalk. His artistic practice includes various disciplines, among which performance, music and visual arts, and revolves around themes of ontological nature such as the definition of the self, his own position in the cultural and social context, the concept of origin and its implication in the development of artistic practices, ones perception in the architectural and virtual space.